Benjamin Hills

Cryo and Hydro Geophysicist

Vista Clara Inc.

I am a geophysicist interested in processes at the interface between climate and geologic systems. In particular, my research has focused on the fluid dynamics and solid mechanics of water and ice as Earth materials. I use geophysical methods, such as ice-penetrating radar to survey glaciers and ice sheets, or magnetic resonance to survey subsurface water. I believe in and practice open science, with free access to data, code, and manuscripts.

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Research Interests

Cryo Geophysics

Instrument design and software for radar sounding

Ice Sheet Properties & Dynamics

Temperature and crystal fabric.

Hydro Geophysics

Subsurface water and methods for non-invasive measurement

Planetary

Extraterrestrial ice and analogs on Earth

Snow, Glaciers, & Alpine Hydrology

Mass balance and runoff.

Subglacial Hydrology

From lakes and channels to groundwater beneath ice

Teaching

I enjoy teaching from Jupyter Notebooks. I use Binder, so each of the links to the right takes you to a ‘hub’ with a precompiled anaconda environment and jupyter notebooks executable on a remote server. Please feel free to take and use these notebooks from the associated github repositories, no permission necessary.

Jupyter Boot Camp

A primer on programming tools for students new to scientific research, with some applications in earth science and climate.

Heat Transfer

Modeling exercises focused on ice applications, including: advection-diffusion problems, Stefan problem.

ImpDAR Tutorials

Walkthrough for the ice-penetrating radar processing and interpretation toolkit developed at UW.

Photo
Galleries

Antarctica

Periglacial

Hydrogeology

Alpine Glaciers

Western Greenland

Radar Stratigraphy

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Annie Cheng, Dustin Schroeder, Natalie Wolfenbarger, Riley Shaper, Cassandra Seltzer, Benjamin Hills (2026). Anisotropic melt inclusions as a confounding signal for ice-penetrating radar observations. In Review.

Project Project

Cassandra Seltzer, Benjamin Hills, Annie Cheng, Natalie Wolfenbarger, Dustin Schroeder (2026). Combined effects of meltwater and crystallographic orientations control radar reflections in temperate ice. In Review.

Project Project

Benjamin Hills, Matthew Siegfried, Hannah Verboncoeur, Nicholas Holschuh, Dustin Schroeder (2026). Resolving radiostratigraphy with squinted synthetic aperture radar focusing. In Review.

Project

Hannah Verboncoeur, Benjamin Hills, Ellianna Abrahams, Matthew Siegfried, Nicholas Holschuh (2026). Subglacial Conditions Estimated From Unsupervised Clustering Analysis of Radar Bed-Echo Shape. In Review.

Project Project

Benjamin Hills, TJ Young, David Lilien, and 29 others (2025). Radar Polarimetry in Glaciology: Theory, Measurement Techniques, and Scientific Applications for Investigating the Anisotropy of Ice Masses Greenland and Canadian Arctic ice temperature profiles database. In RoG.

PDF Code Project Project DOI

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